Howling Darwinists

_{Barry Arrington

September 21, 2017

Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design}

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Several of the usual suspects howled in indignation at my last post, Back to Basics on Whether Truth is Adaptive. Seversky, goodusername, Pindi, Starbuck, critical rationalist, and rvb8 all embarrassed themselves to one degree or another.

This surprised me, because my thesis – that evolutionary theory predicts that belief in the truth is not always adaptive, and, conversely, belief in a falsehood can be adaptive – is a commonplace among evolutionary theorists. It is not the least bit controversial, as I made plain with quotes from Pinker, Baum, Hoffman, Varki, Brower, and even Darwin himself (his famous “horrid doubt” quote).

So I challenged my interlocutors. If you don’t think what I am saying is true, then cite a paper that argues for the opposite proposition: that truth is always adaptive and falsehood is always maladaptive.

The entirely predictable response to the challenge: [crickets]

My interlocutors seemed to be especially flummoxed by the following example I used to illustrate the point:

Oog the caveman thinks Saber Toothed tigers are fun to play with. But he also thinks the best way to play with tigers is to run and hide. Both ideas are contrary to reality. But in combination they result in his survival. Oog is fit under Darwinism’s definition of fit.

For example Goodusername wrote: “Oog doesn’t have long to live.” Why would GUN say that? The example specifically says Oog survived, and why is that surprising? After all, running and hiding when he sees a tiger is one of the best survival behaviors I can imagine.

Nevertheless, GUN insists that Oog’s days are numbered, because he is not thinking straight. THAT IS THE POINT GUN! Natural selection does not care whether Oog is thinking straight. It only cares if his behavior results in his survival. In the example Oog ran and hid and survived. It makes no difference as far as Darwinian fitness is concerned that Oog hid for the wrong reason. The only thing that matters from a fitness perspective is that he hid and therefore survived.

Bottom line: Oog’s false beliefs about playing games with tigers led to a behavior (hiding) that resulted in his survival. Therefore, when Oog acted on the basis of these false beliefs, it increased his fitness (which means nothing more than that he survived to pass along his genes).

Why is this so hard to understand? This is pretty basic stuff. Yet, Rvb8 wrote: “this Oog chap seems to have a parlous grip on his environment and its inhabitants.”

Yes, Rvb8, that is true. And again, that is the point! Oog’s mental grasp on reality is utterly irrelevant to natural selection so long as it leads him to ACT in a way that increases his chances of surviving. And running and hiding from tigers definitely does that for obvious reasons.

Pindi wrote:

Barry, what I am disagreeing with is that a caveman that was so poorly adapted to his environment that be believes sabre tooth tigers are fun to play with is going to survive long enough to breed in comparison to a caveman who recognizes the truth about sabre tooth tigers. Surely that is obvious. I can’t believe you are denying it with a straight face.

*sigh* The point of the example is that Oog IS adapted to his environment. How is he adapted to his environment? Even though he does so for the wrong reason, he runs and hides when he sees a tiger. Maybe another example will help you understand this basic concept:

Scenario one: Oog sees a tiger, and he says to himself, “that tiger wants to play games, and I know his favorite game is hide and seek. I will run into this cave where he can’t find me.” Oog then hides in the cave; the tiger does not find him, and Oog survives.

Scenario two: Ugm sees a tiger, and he says to himself, “that tiger is dangerous. I will run into this cave where he can’t find me.” Ugm then hides in the cave; the tiger does not find him, and Ugm survives.

As between Oog and Ugm, which is more “fit” as far as natural selection is concerned? Trick question. They both survived, and if this one incident is all we know about them, they are equally fit even though Oog acted on false beliefs and Ugm acted on true beliefs. The ONLY way to actually measure relative fitness is to measure relative survival rates. If survival rates are the same, fitness is the same.

I hope our Darwinist friends appreciate the education in Darwinism I am giving them. I doubt they do.

Comments

@KF Yes, KF. Our current explantion for our vision is an example of a good explantion. It consists of a long chain of independently formed, hard to vary assertions about the world. Just like our explantion for the seasons, as I indicated above. It cannot be varied without reducing it’s ability to explain the phenomena in question. If those theories somehow ran into the wall of reality, we would have no where to go. The quest for good explantions is the guiding principle of the enlightenment, while bad explantions blight progress. This is not to say that bad explantions might not be true, but it’s unclear how we could know.critical rationalist_{September 30, 2017
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ET, you got there first. In the natural world, illumination comes from the sun, close to a black body (or, practically, a cavity radiator) at c 5700 K. This peaks in Y-Green, and is continuous, hence the classic rainbow ROYGBIV. Our colour vision pivots on rods and cones, the former being luminance driven and monochrome; the latter, three differing types (rarely, four) that in effect give us an RGB model (i.e., I simplify, there is a far more complicated differential signal processing process involved -- which further shows my point that our visual system models the world, it is not a simplistic, flat rendering). As a result, we can and do exploit this to create colour imagery in print [CMYK] and video [RGB + Luminance etc]. The illusion of moving images exploits the about 1/8 s visual update cycle of our eyes, and by going beyond about 48 Hz, we go beyond flicker effects. [Classically, a double shot of illumination allows us to use 24 frames/s film without excessive flicker -- and Fluorescent lamps pulse at 50 or 60 Hz while being spectral line-dominated sources, where white light LEDs exploit similar properties, by contrast with the continuous spectra of incandescent lamps.] Beyond, we must bring to bear visual processing, e.g. the mystery of blue rendering given the relative sparseness of "blue" cones and how they are scattered away from the fovea centralis. Toss into the mix points like excitation of vision by actinic radiation well beyond the usual visual range and things like how we process patterns of illumination with gaps such as the blind spot into an image of objects in a 3-d world-picture coordinated with hands, pointing/aiming, balance, walking etc. The point is underscored: successful organ systems need not give an exact, accurate rendering of the real world in order to be reproductively advantageous. This is as close as our visual system which we are using to interact in this thread, and let's not go to the physically implemented fast fourier transform frequency-decomposition based process involved in hearing, using resonant hairs in the cochlea. Then, we can look at similar systems across the world of life and ponder how they came to be given the FSCO/I origin by blind chance and mechanical necessity challenge. These are some of the contexts behind remarks by Darwinists above as cited. They know there are some pretty stubborn facts that undermine any notion that our senses and perceptions and framing of world models must be accurate to reality in order to promote survival. Such then extends to a much wider context of our senses and reasoning working off bounded rationality and models not to be equated with reality. At the same time, we also know that we can and routinely do access reality, such that s/he who would impose a Kantian ugly gulch unbridgeably separating perceived phenomena from things in themselves runs right into self-referential incoherence. So, we come to the centrality of the rationally and responsibly free mind, synthesising not only a functionally adequate but in key respects true access to the world. Not just the empirically experienced world but that of abstract ideas, concepts and thought, starting with the "unreasonable" effectiveness of the logic of structure and quantity, aka mathematics. And indeed last week it was interesting to see how a local atheist tried to rhetorically suggest that von Neumann's construction of the natural numbers was meaningless abstruseness rather than engage the implication of the collapse of naive crude empiricism and materialism. He had hitherto been used to discomfiting primary age sunday school level thought and appeals to scripture. A comparison above and in linked threads points to much the same issues with the circle of persistent objectors here in this thread, in UD at large and in the penumbra of objector sites around UD. KFkairosfocus_{September 27, 2017
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rvb8- There isn't a scientific theory of evolution for scientists to use and that is a fact. So that would be a problem. But I am sure you will ignore that and prattle on anyway.ET_{September 26, 2017
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RVB "Try again, with less emotional absurdity, and more reliance on something testable." Very good! Give us an example. All your defence of evolutionary theory is off the point simply because even to start evolution requires information processing. In order to get to a population of self-reproducing machines (the starting point for biological evolution), one requires a semantically closed symbolic description of those machines. Such a description, to be semantically closed, should include a description of the interpreter of that description! This is a stopper conundrum for naturalism. That is why I think that, IMHO, ID would have merit even if it were limited only to its negative part, i.e. to demonstrating the impossibility of non-telic emergence of the first ever {code,interpreter} pair. The positive ID part consists in demonstrating that the only empirically warranted source of that pair is intelligence external to it. Instead of your uninteresting and irrelevant ad hominem critique of the comments of others, please concentrate on how you would propose to resolve the above conundrum naturalistically.Eugene S_{September 26, 2017
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ET, 1.) Say this three times; 'No scientists use evolutionary theory in any of their work, No scientists use...' 2.) Spin around three times and touch wood. 3.) Hey presto, a new ID fact.rvb8_{September 25, 2017
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Seversky:
No, I’m pointing out that phenomena such as the process by which photons of image-forming light are transduced into electro-chemical signals in the retina have been described in purely physical or material terms.
The same goes for the image on a TV- electro-chemical signals that have been described in a purely physical or material world. Cars? Purely electro-chemical-mechanical.
In the absence of any compelling evidence for design, how the eye came to be the way it is the province of evolutionary biology.
The entire thing, ie the vision system, is more than compelling evidence for ID. What else is there? How many just-so mutations are you allowing under a scientific scenario? Again, your position cannot get beyond populations of prokaryotes and that is given starting populations of prokaryotes. So what, exactly, do you have besides your story-telling?ET_{September 25, 2017
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Seversky, absence of evidence for design you are prepared to acknowledge is not the same as absence of "compelling" evidence for design. To see that, simply provide ONE observed case of origin of functionally specific complex, coherently organisation and/or information beyond 500 - 1,000 bits that definitively comes from blind chance and/or mechanical necessity without intelligently directed configuration. There are trillions of cases of such FSCO/I by known design, and for instance the computer or the like you are using will show processes of mechanical interaction with inputs, procesing and transformation to yield outputs, handling of noise and other chance factors, yielding functional outputs all based on intelligently directed configuration. That said, you have dragged the focus away from the directly relevant point. Namely, that the eye and onward elements of our visual system process based on selective filtering through sensitivity response curves in accord with a more or less log compressed framework, creating a model of the world that for instance is distinctly not a flat response to colour. The peak is of course Y. Green. In some cases, shifted sensitivities give rise to a muddying of distinctions, AKA certain sorts of colour blindness, which are currently addressed by use of dark glasses that apply a pre-filter, yielding dramatic, tear inducing improved colour vision. Tha, BTW,t is itself suggestive on how we must learn to address comparative difficulties analysis of worldviews. The further point is, that functional effectiveness, differential reproductive success and accuracy or truth are three different things which bear no simple relationship. Further to this, I am confident that you cannot show by objective, observation led means, how a FSCO/I rich computational substrate and linked programming can arise by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity, or how such can attain to the sort of rational responsible freedom that is required for reasoning, warranting and knowing truth. That is, Darwin's dilemma of the mind to get to his theories is still with us. So is the selective hyperskepticism he used that failed to see the self-referential incoherence in his arguments. KFkairosfocus_{September 25, 2017
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kairosfocus @ 60
Seversky, false. The response of the eye isa a measured thing and it does not require any commitment to evolutionary materialism to take such measurements. Measurements behind things like colour TV. You have conflated science with the self-refuting ideology of evolutionary materialism, which does like to dress itself up in the lab coat. KF
No, I'm pointing out that phenomena such as the process by which photons of image-forming light are transduced into electro-chemical signals in the retina have been described in purely physical or material terms. In the absence of any compelling evidence for design, how the eye came to be the way it is the province of evolutionary biology. Since it is not unreasonable to assume that the eye, as a physical system, is the current endpoint of complex chains of physical cause and effect. In other words, it is the evolution of a physical system. Evolutionary materialism as an ideology is, in my view, no more than a rhetorical device which attempts to prise the theory of evolution away from the enterprise of science for purely ideological and religious reasons.Seversky_{September 25, 2017
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CR, reality is that which is, whether or no we know or even suspect it. Thus, it is an origin of thought; e.g. truth is that which says of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, as Ari put it. When therefore I described models as moving away from reality into "simplifications" etc, I spoke to how models as a rule are useful fictions -- yes fictions not truths -- that can be empirically reliable in a zone of calibrated validity. It turns out our visual system uses sensors that have peaked sensitivity to varying frequencies, and that our sense is a log response (approximately), e,g. as seen from stellar magnitudes. That is a start-point for dealing with the gap between useful perception and belief etc on the one part, truth on the second, and differential reproductive success on the third. All of which cuts away the rhetorical distractors and brings us back to focus on the OP's point. KFkairosfocus_{September 25, 2017
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CR: So, let me fix that for you… ... if knowledge is defined as justified true belief, CR is saying “none of our knowledge is knowledge.”
"None of our knowledge is knowledge", including the knowledge that “none of our knowledge is knowledge.” You are not making sense CR. Stop it already.Origenes_{September 25, 2017
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Seversky:
As from being intellectually bankrupt, it is not only the best framework theory available to account for the nature of life on Earth...
LoL! And yet it cannot account for the nature of life on earth. Heck given starting populations of prokaryotes yours doesn't have a mechanism capable of getting beyond more populations of prokaryotes. And forget about the origin of living organisms.
it continues to drive research on a scale that ID can only dream of.
Nonsense. It doesn't drive any research. No one uses it for anything. The concept is totally useless.ET_{September 25, 2017
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@KF
First, look at the already linked on how vision works and then ponder how models move away from actual reality to create “simplifications” or “abstractions” or “representations” of key features or focal aspects that amount to being useful fictions.
Except, they don't move away from actual realty since we don't start with actual realty in the first place. Observations those models are based on are themselves theory laden, etc. You cannot extrapolate observations without first putting them into some kind of explanatory theory. That always comes first. What you're assuming is that experience is an authoritative source of knowledge that we can turn to as a last resort. And I've presented criticism of that idea. Rather, knowledge starts out as educated guesses which get closer to reality via criticism of some form. As Barry pointed out, they slam into the wall of reality. Apparently, you think theory doesn't come first because "that's just what some designer must have wanted" or "a designer somehow designed us for truth"?
Beyond, focus the point that it is behaviors in the world not invisible beliefs that count for differential reproductive success in a context of variation. This is held to trigger descent with modification — aka adaptation — which is further held by Darwinists to be cumulatively unlimited leading to the branching tree of life or the like.
Behaviors are based on some kind of knowledge, which isn't justified, true belief. If the behavior was based on Oog's genes, in that he lacks some low level, instinctual fear of unknown agents that might harm him, this would manifest itself beyond just tigers. If he does not have this instinctual fear, then there are other predators in his environment that will likely kill him, such as other animals and even other contemporaries. And lets not forget the tendency to project agency of some sort everywhere, which would be a useful behavior, could also cause us to project agency in places there is none, like the rustle of grass, or anger in thunder, or the features of an organism, or the laws of physics of the universe, or events that results in them being unharmed in an accident or the remission of a disease, such as cancer, etc. However, nothing in our instinct is as elaborate as playing hide and seek with just tigers, which would be an idea that exists in Oog's brain, not his genome. Oog's brain could just as well contain the idea that tigers want to eat him and that hiding in a cave would be the best way to interact with them. Even then, some animals that are raised by humans cannot be released into the wild because they no longer fear humans or other predators. This lack of fear will not be present in future generations unless they to are also raised by human beings, etc. IOW, future behavior based on reproductive success actually depends on that knowledge getting pasted on in offspring. So, an idea in Oog's brain or the conditioning of an animal will not get passed down due to reproductive selection. Rather, it is acquired during the lifetime, not due to a mutation of their genes during replication or something like HGT. It's unclear why this is so difficult to comprehend or why someone with knowledge of biological Darwinism wouldn't realize this. To use my analogy, a modern day Oog orders a manual on "How to Interact with Tigers". However, unknown to Oog, he actually receives the contents of the manual of "How to Interact with Kittens" Specially, the publisher used the manual of "How to Interact with Kittens" as a template for the manual on tigers. He changes the title to "How to best interact with Tigers", does a search and replace to exchange "kittens" with "tigers" and then saves the document. He then goes about updating the rest of the content with the appropriate actions for tigers. However, he gets distracted by some urgent issue, thinks he saved the document, his computer crashes, etc. What actually ends up with an incomplete update that retains the knowledge about how to interact with kittens instead of tigers. Oog receives it and follows the instructions. Regardless of what Oog believes or his intention, etc. He will only survive if the knowledge of how to safely interact with tigers is actually present there. So, at some point, the evolution of human beings took a back seat to the evolution of our ideas. Both represent the growth of knowledge.
The rhetorical flourish of the story of Oog draws attention to this by highlighting implications for trying to draw out the credibility of mindedness from computational substrates which have hardware and software shaped by strictly blind processes of chance and mechanical necessity.
We currently don't know why people are conscious, have a unique self of sense, etc. We have several leading theories, but none stand out to the degree necessary to be "the" theory of conciseness However, we do know that brains are storage mediums. And knowledge is information that plays a causal role in being retained when embedded in a storage medium. So, in many cases, knowledge fits the definition of a constructor because it causes transformations from input substrates to output substrates without being changed. Some other information does not play that casual role. And some other knowledge does play some other role, but in a different situation. This is not random, in the sense that you're implying. Nor can intelligent agents merely choose for some bits on a flash drive to play a specific causal role, such as curing cancer. If that were the case, the medical community, being intelligent agents, would have a cure for cancer right now. But we do not. IOW, there is no evolutionary materialist answer to how to ground our knowledge because knowledge isn't grounded in anything. That it needs to be grounded is a epistemological idea about knowledge. How can you justified the idea that ideas need to be justified? I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying that we started out by conjecturing many ideas about what knowledge could be. And then we set about criticizing, them. Actually, that's not true. Not all conjectured ideas about knowledge include the idea that knowledge should be criticized. Some conjectured ideas about knowledge include, well, the idea that only some knowledge is subject to criticism. And those who hold it consider those ideas are immune to criticism. IOW, they think the idea that ideas must be justified is not an idea that is subject to criticism! They refuse to accept criticisms of it because of that very conjectured idea that considered it immune! It's a vicious circle.critical rationalist_{September 25, 2017
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RVB8, projection in face of facts. Several times in your presence the basis for the scaling of the death toll of the abortion holocaust has been presented, so your pretence that an UNDERESTIMATE is 'emotion" is deceitful. Guttmacher and UN as brought to attention through BBC (as in about 1 mn abortions per week currently) and followed up are not matters of empty emotion, where a linear growth model across 40 years and knock off 20% is actually an underestimate. The further point is, to support and sustain that mass slaughter of posterity in the womb . . . and that too is fact . . . our generation has willfully blinded itself and benumbed its conscience, corrupting media, education, parliaments, laws, courts and more. And, to be concerned and to challenge holocaust in progress is an APPROPRIATE response; it is trying to make it out to be "a nuh nutten" that is deplorable enabling behaviour. Perhaps, you need to read Pastor Niemoller and others such as the White Rose martyrs. Where, with that amount of warping and corruption in the culture and its institutions, it is utterly unsurprising that we are on the whole so debased in our thinking. As for the basic fact that vision exemplifies just how accuracy and functional effectiveness can diverge, that is already well established. I have pointed out the problem of getting to responsibly, rationally free knowing mind from blindly built and programmed mechanical computational substrates. As for the point that differential reproductive success is tied to behaviours not beliefs or truth, that is equally massively documented. The reactions we are seeing therefore inadvertently tell us a lot. KFkairosfocus_{September 24, 2017
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Seversky, false. The response of the eye isa a measured thing and it does not require any commitment to evolutionary materialism to take such measurements. Measurements behind things like colour TV. You have conflated science with the self-refuting ideology of evolutionary materialism, which does like to dress itself up in the lab coat. KFkairosfocus_{September 24, 2017
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kairosfocus @ 44
RVB8, are you aware that neither our eyes or ears give a simple, straight, “flat” rendering of the realities of light and sound? Do you appreciate the Weber-Fechner log-response law that in effect means there is signal compression and response to fractional not absolute changes? Are you aware of the peaked nature of visual response, even within the octave of the EM spectrum it responds to? What ULTRA violet and INFRA red originally meant i/l/o discoveries that there was more that we were not seeing? Similarly for ULTRA and INFRA sound? Etc?
You are aware that everything you've described above is based on a materialist/physicalist account of the nature of objective reality?
In short, our main means of interaction with and awareness of the world give us a model view not a simple direct view. Models are by definition false but useful frameworks for handling aspects of the world. That’s why we speak of regions of validity and empirical reliability. etc. That BTW takes in a LOT of science.
It would be better to acknowledge that our models or accounts or narratives are neither absolutely true nor false. They vary in the degree to which they can be observed to correspond with what they purport to describe but it is misleading to think in absolutist terms of black-and-white or true-and-false. Our best current theories of relativity and quantum physics arose out of a growing awareness of the limits of Newtonian mechanics. They have proven to be phenomenally accurate and enabled us to do things we could not have done without them. But good as they are, there is still a problem. How are the two to be reconciled? Apparently, neither is the whole picture but does this make them totally false?
Next, we can insert the point BA aptly made and which it seems every bit of rhetorical gymnastics has been used to strawmannise or evade: differential reproductive success is a matter of behaviour in niches, not of accuracy of beliefs, perceptions, models etc . . . which from Darwin on have been a major bugbear of evolutionary accounts of mind.
Yes, evolution discriminates between behaviors. But, in humans, behavior is influenced by beliefs, perceptions, models, etc. There appears to be no way for those beliefs to be encoded in our genes but then that isn't really necessary if they can be passed from person-to-person and from generation to generation by other intellectual capabilities such as the capacity for language. This could influence survival rates much more quickly than natural selection and could be one of the reasons we find it advantageous to support such a resource-hungry organ as the brain. There is certainly a problem in explaining in detail how the phenomena we call 'mind' are generated by the activity of the physical brain but it is clear the two are intimately connected and the current lack of an explanation doesn't mean there never will be one
Where, finally, responsible, rational freedom is inherently unreachable from evolutionary materialism, which is a self-referential absurdity as such theories crucially depend on our being able to reason, discuss, respond based on evidence and know. The rhetorical antics above and in previous threads where these and similar points have come up simply underscore just how on-target the issue is. Evolutionary materialism is incoherent, self-refuting, intellectually and morally bankrupt
Evolutionary materialism is neither incoherent nor self-refuting although, like all other theories, it is far from complete. As from being intellectually bankrupt, it is not only the best framework theory available to account for the nature of life on Earth, it continues to drive research on a scale that ID can only dream of. As for moral bankruptcy, evolutionary biology deals with the nature of life on Earth. Morals are not its business.
As we can see all around us as it and its fellow traveller ideologies increasingly lead our civilisation on a march of suicidally ruinous folly, all the time pretending to be “science.” It seems that only when we have gone off the cliff that many will be woken up by the pain of trying to live as a broken-backed civilisation. Posterity will rise up and for cause deem us a hell-bent, foolish, accursed generation who refused to acknowledge the truth about ourselves. That starts with the holocaust of 800++ million unborn children slaughtered since the 1970’s and so also with the depraved minds and benumbed consciences thereby revealed. Such guilt warps ability to see and think straight and is powerful as a point that shows just how bankrupt we are. KF
Human civilization has always been a bloody awful mess overall. The so-called 'golden ages' of various societies have usually been cherry-picked islands of relative peace and stability in a worldwide morass of human misery. That's why I'm not impressed with apocalyptic visions and chest-beating, hair-shirt wearing, self-flagellating sermons of guilt. We may well all be going to hell in a handbasket but until the majority become starkly aware of the danger, I doubt that much will change. Unfortunately, the God who by some accounts could actually do something about it all seems to be notable by His absence. Maybe He's there and maybe He's not but either way it looks like we're on our own.Seversky_{September 24, 2017
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kairos @55, "The rhetorical flourish of the story of Ooog..." kairos, Barry's story of an imaginary caveman, playing out a survival incident by playing a game with a pinnacle carnivore, is not, 'rhetorical flourish'. It is a patronising attempt at mocking his childish carricature of a scientific theory. When I said 'eh?', at 46, it was because your post was wildly emotional ('800 million++ unborn children slaughtered..'), deliberately obscure, ('self referential absurdity', What does this mean?), and invoking the obscure, ('Do you appreciate the Weber-Fechner log response law...?'). Kairos, I have said this umpteen times, ID gets no where because it deliberately, or not, is unintelligable. Your posts are perfect examples of psudo-science gone off the tracks. When you and ID can explain your idea as simply as, "descent with modification", you may be on to something. But endless dense posts, that leave the reader scratching their heads, will simply allianate your supposed grass roots; intelligent, honest, Christians. Try again, with less emotional absurdity, and more reliance on something testable. Barry'e imaginary Ooog, is a train wreck of an idea, for the very simple evolutionary fact, that such a creature would fail to reproduce as it would long ago have been predated, because of its seriously flawed views about carnivores. Now, that last sentence explains the evolutionary position succinctly, try that with ID; that is, less padding, waffle, emotion, and bluster.rvb8_{September 24, 2017
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By now of course I mean the 21st century ;)EugeneS_{September 24, 2017
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Paraphrasing some outright Darwinists, to anyone with a brain (c) it is clear now that the Darwinian model has been totally debunked ;) Trying to explain the obvious to somebody who is unwilling to engage and acting like a whimsical child is to waste time.EugeneS_{September 24, 2017
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CR, why am I not surprised? First, look at the already linked on how vision works and then ponder how models move away from actual reality to create "simplifications" or "abstractions" or "representations" of key features or focal aspects that amount to being useful fictions. This will allow you to see that utility is not a demonstration of accuracy to reality, especially when simplification leads to rapid adequate action in a situation. Beyond, focus the point that it is behaviours in the world not invisible beliefs that count for differential reproductive success in a context of variation. This is held to trigger descent with modification -- aka adaptation -- which is further held by Darwinists to be cumulatively unlimited leading to the branching tree of life or the like. The rhetorical flourish of the story of Oog draws attention to this by highlighting implications for trying to draw out the credibility of mindedness from computational substrates which have hardware and software shaped by strictly blind processes of chance and mechanical necessity. The reactions and even triggering that have been going on simply tell us the point hits home hard and that there is no cogent evolutionary materialist answer -- which instantly extends to fellow travellers. Given that this is a context of reduction to self-referential incoherence for supporters of such, that is no surprise. The rhetorical flourish simply draws attention to what is usually studiously ignored, or is dismissed without serious consideration. Thus, it serves its purpose, especially when we see so many stilted attempts to dismiss it. KFkairosfocus_{September 24, 2017
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CR--In addition, knowledge is independent of anyone’s belief.-- You mean truth is independent of belief. Thinking you know something isn't knowing something. We laugh at things that were common understanding a thousand years ago. Without a telescope heliocentrism does not become accepted. Ultimately, it comes down to faith for everybody and everything. BTW, why do you use the phrase "God magically"? God-fearing people generally don't believe in magic.tribune7_{September 24, 2017
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@KF Have to say, I’m with rvb8 on this one. Huh? Do you realize that, despite supposedly being designed, Barry’s Oog described the vast majority of human history, right? These were people with effectively the same brains as we have today. However, there lives were dominated by useful rules of thumb that bore little resemblance to the truth. Virtually nothing new was learned for generation after generation. They wanted to make progress but simply did not. Why? Because they didn’t know how. Neither did Oog. Furthermore, Its unclear how despite some designer supposdling wanting us to, we are still don’t end up with knowege as justified, true belief. Knowelge isn’t justified because justification is impossible. And knowlege isn’t true because it is always incomplete and contains errors to some degree. In addition, knowege is independent of anyone’s belief. I’ve made arguments to this effect which no one has addressed. Namely, the scenario of being accidentally set the plans or a boat, intstead of a car, etc. Desipte being an intelligent agent, one’s belief, intent or desire won’t cause you to end up with a car instead of a boat. Right? I mean, what gives? I keep making this argument and no one has any response. This isn’t exactly rocket science. It’s merely trying to take your theory seriously, as if were true in reality. So, how is this not a valid criticism? What is your response to it, other than calling it a “trick” or the response of a “depraved mind”, whatever thats supposed to mean? Is criticism somehow less valid depending on where it comes from? Good criticism is good critism because of its content, not its source. So, why isn’t this good criticism? Last but not least, even if God magically did give us the ability to somehow “choose” between external theories about how the world works, that would stil require there to actually be theories out there to choose from, in the first place, that we can derive from observations. And, as I’ve argued, the contents of our theories are not derived from observation. So, apparently, not only does God magically cause our brains to be “designed for truth” but he somehow magically allows us to chose from non-existent theories as well?critical rationalist_{September 24, 2017
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Oh my...is there a patron saint for people like this? Its accepted that truth/reality isnt just irrelevant to survival, it's MALADAPTIVE. A net negative. This 'reasoning' is required by the atheist disconnect re brain and mind. Dis the analogy all u like, its still an accurate reflection of current thinking, and highlights the sheer absurdity thereof.gooshy_{September 24, 2017
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Origenes: Well, if we are going to answer that question from an evolutionary standpoint, instead of insisting that it is turtles all the way down, then, obviously, at some point, a random belief-behavior system got selected.
It's why evolutionary dogma is not science. It demands that all evidence fit the answer even when the evidence contradicts it. Ironically, it is exactly the same as creation science i.e. starting with the conclusion rather than the evidence.tribune7_{September 24, 2017
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Tribune7: Oog and the tiger is a nurture thing not a nature thing. ... it’s because the adults (or their ancestors) have seen man kill and so they run hence the pups run too. It’s learned.
Hypothesizing that it is nurture — that beliefs and behavior are learned — is not a solution, but, instead, pushes the need for an evolutionary explanation back one level. The question becomes: How did former generations acquire the information? Well, if we are going to answer that question from an evolutionary standpoint, instead of insisting that it is turtles all the way down, then, obviously, at some point, a random belief-behavior system got selected.Origenes_{September 24, 2017
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I can't say that I'm following this discussion perfectly but it has dawned on me that it has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. Oog and the tiger is a nurture thing not a nature thing. Animals fear man. Why? Because they have gene that says run when they smell us? No, it's because the adults (or their ancestors) have seen man kill and so they run hence the pups run too. It's learned. Animals can lose this fear hence the signs saying Don't feed the bears. Of course, this works the other way. If Oog is raised with tame, friendly tigers he won't be afraid of tigers. It doesn't matter if this belief causes his death before he procreates as it won't be passed on genetically. As I said I'm missing a point here. Evolution can explain some things but it can't explain everything.tribune7_{September 24, 2017
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kairos, thank you. I truly don't know what the deal with rv is, but he is flying in the face of scientific evidence and consensus to a further degree than he believes those he disagrees with do. Even his hero Dawkins continually points out that most of what-is-real slips by us. We, according to Dawkins, and I think most others, evolved to survive in the African savannah, not to fully experience the totality of the material universe. Our brains developed highly sophisticated weeding out mechanisms so that we didn't drown ourselves in stimuli on a regular basis and be unable to recognize important things to our survival, such as the scent of food or the movement of a possible predator. NOTHING is new about any of this. It's as basic evolutionary science as one can hope to encounter. None of us, ever, see the 'truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth'. Does rv understand this?soundburger_{September 24, 2017
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RVB8, that tactic is playing dumb or pretending relevant facts are not relevant. I am too busy to play silly agit prop games, but I paused as this thread was getting beyond the pale. I just documented that our major senses present us with a model, not an accurate perception of reality. Those senses shape beliefs and behaviour and can and do contribute to reproductive success without being exactly accurate, making the core point coming out the starting gates. This then presents all the issues raised in the OP, in a context where even our most important senses are not a precise 1:1 copy of reality. Oog as playing hide and go seek with overgrown tabby cats is not essentially different from this point, though it is a rhetorical flourish. The main issue is that beliefs, worldviews and perceptions shape behaviour and can be amenable to differential reproductive success without being precisely accurate to reality, which is now on the table. So, too, is the point that the evolutionary materialist undermining of responsible rational freedom in favour of trying to squeeze knowing mind out of a blindly mechanical, blindly programmed computational substrate leading to self-referential incoherence and undermining of knowledge itself. KF PS: And, don't even think about switching over to the Kantian ugly gulch line of thought.kairosfocus_{September 24, 2017
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kairos @44, eh?rvb8_{September 23, 2017
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PS: Spectral response of eye: http://www.telescope-optics.net/eye_spectral_response.htm note on intensity response: http://www.telescope-optics.net/eye_intensity_response.htm On response to X radiation (a fascinating little informal experiment): http://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.1974240 Do not do this at home! But note the inversion of the normal fluorescent screen image vs the direct X-ray image indicating the latter is by response of the retina, bypassing the lens. Could this last be part of the response of people who saw atom bomb tests even when they were turned away from the bomb and had eyes closed etc? After all, X rays fog film, indeed that is part of how they were recognised. This points to similarity of relevant energy levels for transitions in the sensing system, of order of eV.kairosfocus_{September 23, 2017
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RVB8, are you aware that neither our eyes or ears give a simple, straight, "flat" rendering of the realities of light and sound? Do you appreciate the Weber-Fechner log-response law that in effect means there is signal compression and response to fractional not absolute changes? Are you aware of the peaked nature of visual response, even within the octave of the EM spectrum it responds to? What ULTRA violet and INFRA red originally meant i/l/o discoveries that there was more that we were not seeing? Similarly for ULTRA and INFRA sound? Etc? In short, our main means of interaction with and awareness of the world give us a model view not a simple direct view. Models are by definition false but useful frameworks for handling aspects of the world. That's why we speak of regions of validity and empirical reliability. etc. That BTW takes in a LOT of science. Next, we can insert the point BA aptly made and which it seems every bit of rhetorical gymnastics has been used to strawmannise or evade: differential reproductive success is a matter of behaviour in niches, not of accuracy of beliefs, perceptions, models etc . . . which from Darwin on have been a major bugbear of evolutionary accounts of mind. Where, finally, responsible, rational freedom is inherently unreachable from evolutionary materialism, which is a self-referential absurdity as such theories crucially depend on our being able to reason, discuss, respond based on evidence and know. The rhetorical antics above and in previous threads where these and similar points have come up simply underscore just how on-target the issue is. Evolutionary materialism is incoherent, self-refuting, intellectually and morally bankrupt. As we can see all around us as it and its fellow traveller ideologies increasingly lead our civilisation on a march of suicidally ruinous folly, all the time pretending to be "science." It seems that only when we have gone off the cliff that many will be woken up by the pain of trying to live as a broken-backed civilisation. Posterity will rise up and for cause deem us a hell-bent, foolish, accursed generation who refused to acknowledge the truth about ourselves. That starts with the holocaust of 800++ million unborn children slaughtered since the 1970's and so also with the depraved minds and benumbed consciences thereby revealed. Such guilt warps ability to see and think straight and is powerful as a point that shows just how bankrupt we are. KFkairosfocus_{September 23, 2017
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